Offline

March 3, 2013

I don't have internet at home. Although it sounds horrible, it's working
out better than I ever thought it would. With a bit of preparation, and
assuming you have access at some point during the day, it could work
just fine for you too.

There are two major things I do on my computer. Code and listen to
music. I also check email way too much, but that can be mitigated.
Granted, I'm not saying not having internet is better than having it,
but you'd be surprised at how much you can get done without it (and
you can argue, there are areas you can be more productive without
internet).

If you're in my line of work, you can't avoid doing work at home. But if
you get a good grip on setting up your work environment so that you can
work completely offline, you almost forget you don't have internet. It's
just once in a while when you google something, expecting Stack Overflow
to come up as the first result, as it always does, when you think, oh,
that's right. Then you go ahead and work on the thousand other things
that need to be worked on.

I'm a heavy user of online music services, mainly Spotify and
SoundCloud. If you're ambitious enough, you can download a lot of the
music you listen to on SoundCloud to your computer, but I don't bother.
For nine bucks a month, Spotify lets you download your playlists to your
computer to play offline. That's incredible. There's a lot of music
exclusive to SoundCloud but that can wait when I have internet for most
of the rest of the day.

Admittedly, I'm not completely disconnected. I have an iPhone, although
any smartphone will do. If you have to check your email, or you need
your regular fixes of Facebook and Twitter, just do it on your phone. I
like those last two's mobile experiences better anyway.

I also have a local copy of my email using offlineimap and Mutt. There's
an unfortunate amount of information that lives in my email that might
actually be useful even when I don't have internet, so I took an hour
and followed this tutorial. Works as advertised.
In fact, it's kind of nice to download all your mail before you leave
the office for the day, spend some time at night with a beer or in the
morning with a coffee writing your responses, saving them to be sent off
when you get back to whereever you have internet.

The crazy thing is, with no internet, I might be even more productive
than when I'm with. When I have internet, it's so easy for one of the
million of distractions available online to catch your eye and to lead
you off track. Nothing is there to catch your eye when websites don't
load. It's just listening to music, and working.

And by working, I don't necessarily mean the work you do day to day.
There are so many things we all want to do, be it side projects or
personal ambitions, that involves staring at a screen. When you don't
have internet, meaning when you don't have the opportunity to dwindle
your hours away consuming random shit, the next thing that always comes
to mind is the stuff you want to do on the side. Sure, I work on work,
but I also built this entire current iteration of this blog offline.
One of the best parts of side projects is learning and playing with
new things so it might be hard if you don't have Stack Overflow at
your fingertips, but if you're careful enough, before you leave your
internet, load up some resources that will get you through the hour or
two of work you have available at home and you will be good.

Here's something to try. Turn off your internet at work and work. You
might be surprised at how much you get done.